Dee Bell's comeback at 142 Throckmorton Theatre

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Jazz vocalist Dee Bell performs with the Marcos Silva Band July 14 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley.

Jazz vocalist Dee Bell performs with the Marcos Silva Band July 14 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley.

Photo: Murphy Productions

Photo: Murphy Productions

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Jazz vocalist Dee Bell performs with the Marcos Silva Band July 14 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley.

Jazz vocalist Dee Bell performs with the Marcos Silva Band July 14 at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley.

Photo: Murphy Productions

Dee Bell's comeback at 142 Throckmorton Theatre

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A quarter-century ago, Dee Bell was one of the most acclaimed jazz vocalists in the Bay Area. She and her mentor, veteran San Francisco guitarist Eddie Duran, cut two albums for the Concord Jazz label, the first featuring tenor saxophone titan Stan Getz, the second trumpet great Tom Harrell.

Leonard Feather, the dean of jazz journalists, praised her - "Dee Bell has a haunting, jazz-inflected sound, her diction and phrasing flawless," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times - as did The Chronicle's Jesse Hamilin and the Examiner's Philip Elwood locally. Besides occasional club dates in Los Angeles, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Sapporo, Japan, she worked regularly in the Bay Area at Yoshi's in Oakland, the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco and the Dock in Tiburon.

A low profile

For the past two decades, however, she has kept a very low profile, appearing only in "little drops and drabs," as she puts it. She continued giving annual summer recitals at Indianapolis Artsgarden in her native Indiana, but limited local performances to private parties, benefits and jam sessions. She spent most of her time teaching music to grades K-2 in the Mill Valley school system, working as a graphic artist for Marin County churches and raising her and husband Jim Becker's son, Alan, now 20.

"I stopped doing nightclubs," Bell, 61, says over a lunch of homemade coconut milk, curry and cauliflower soup and a salad in the combination dining room and office of her Mill Valley home. A Senegal parrot and cockatiel, both cage free, can be heard chattering in the adjacent living room.

"I was not able to maintain that late-night thing," she says. "For a long time, they wanted four sets for 50 bucks, 9 to 1. I just couldn't and be present for my son."

A third CD by Bell, "Sagacious Grace," with tenor saxophonist Houston Person and guitarist John Stowell as guest soloists, was issued in August by Laser Records, a tiny label in North Carolina. It was played on KCSM in San Mateo and other jazz stations around the country, reaching No. 31 on JazzWeek's airplay chart, although a station in Sacramento refused to air it, because it was felt to be, the singer says, "too old."

"Sagacious Grace" is, in fact, rather old, having been recorded in 1990. It was not released at the time, however, because of poor microphone placement by a studio intern that caused John Wiitala's bass to be horribly distorted. The problem was finally fixed two decades later by engineers Bud Spangler and Dan Feiszli.

"I wept when they started cleaning it up, because I'd tried twice," Bell says.

Three instrumentals

In addition to such songs as "Watch What Happens," "You're My Thrill," "I Remember You," "Comes Love," "I'll Never Be the Same" and "Dear Bix" (Dave Frishberg's tender tribute to the tragic Bix Beiderbecke), the disc includes Bell's lyrics for three jazz instrumentals: Billy Strayhorn's "Isfahan," Jimmy Rowles' "The Peacocks" and Don Sebesky's "You Can't Go Home Again."

Bell does not scat on "Sagacious Grace," nor had she on her two earlier recordings. "I really like lyrics," she says. "Although I took this jazz improvisation class and did scatting, I still don't like it. It does nothing for me. I'd rather listen to the horn players do it and then come back and tell you what the lyrics have to say."

Born in Fort Wayne, Ind., Bell grew up listening to a wide variety of music, from Doris Day and Peggy Lee to the Beach Boys and Johnny Cash. She sang folk and country-rock music while attending the University of Indiana in Bloomington. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in arts education, she and a boyfriend ran a vegetarian cafeteria in Bloomington.

A hippie

She considered herself a hippie and gave massages and delivered babies without a license. For 2 1/2 years, she lived alone, save for a family of bats, in a two-room shack in the Hoosier National Forest. She wore construction boots on her treks into town to deliver her commercial artwork, to protect her feet from snow or overflow from nearby Lake Monroe.

Bell moved to the Bay Area in 1978 in hopes of joining a country-rock band. She quickly landed a waitressing job at the Trident in Sausalito, where her duties included unloading albums from a custom-made LP jukebox programmed by jazz pianist and disc jockey Dick Conte. She fell in love with both Conte and jazz and started learning standards.

One night after her shift at the restaurant, Duran heard her singing "Happy Birthday" to a customer and was so impressed that he began having her sit in. The two then began working on a demo tape that led to their album with Getz, "Let There Be Love," issued in 1983.

The singer had hoped to do a show last year to coincide with the release of her "old new" CD. A case of pneumonia prevented it, as did her inability to find a piano accompanist as empathetic as Al Plank, who had played on and wrote arrangements for the album. He died in 2003.

Finally, in November, she met Marcos Silva, a Brazilian pianist living in Oakland who was once musical director for Flora Purim and Airito. "We went through some tunes, and I felt like finally someone understands underneath," she says of Silva.

Backed by Silva on acoustic and electric pianos, electric bassist Doug Lee and drummer Phil Thompson, Bell will perform a "comeback" concert Saturday at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. Part of the proceeds will go to Camp Create, an arts-immersion program for at-risk youth from San Rafael and Marin City held July 16-22 at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Belvedere, where the singer works as a graphic artist.

New arrangements

The program will include new arrangements of tunes from "Sagacious Grace."

"When I was putting together the music for the show," Bell says, "I was thinking I could go ahead and just present the songs the way they were done on the recording. But that was 20 years ago." {sbox}